What possible reason could there be for a Pope to apparently deny the Incarnation and arrange the worship of idols of a pagan fertility demon except to torment believing Catholics and to push the Church toward apostasy?
Suppose, though, that most of the pressure he gets is coming mostly from the other direction. (Just like Mark Zuckerberg mostly gets heat for being too lenient on conservatives and “Russians”.) Suppose the Pope believes that these blasphemous acts, protected by the thinnest shred of ambiguity, are the bare minimum he must do for a flock demanding idolatry, demanding a renunciation of historic Catholicism, to keep the Church from emptying utterly.
What if he’s right?
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Throne and Altar 
Well, except for the fact that these things seem to empty churches not fill them. Is the flock really demanding the worship of pagan fertility idols? And if they were is there any justification for bringing idols into a church? If the gods of the gentiles are devils, tossing them into the Tiber seems about right actually. The clergy put it there as I understand it but it was a layman who tossed it out. This type of thing doesn’t really seem that complex. Not in any real sense.
Part of the problem of course is that no one is innocent. That being said “looking within” to find the reasons your husband is beating you has got to have some limits.
Assuming for a moment that the majority of the living Roman Catholic church does actually have a preference for these things, doesn’t that make it more profound that Christ used analogies like shepherd/sheep and master/slave to describe his kingdom? The worst thing the twentieth century took from us is the ability to say (and to hear) the word “no.”
Oh, he hates us. And he’s stacking the church’s bureaucracy to ensure that his successor will be as radical as he is, if not more, because after Francis the younger conservatives will be driven away and there will be no one to resist.
If you want a proxy for the opinions of the faithful toward what’s happening in the Vatican right now, look at finances. The church is in a financial death spiral (1) because people have stopped giving, and (2) because the socialist pope has been using money intended for missionary efforts as if he’s running a hedge fund (investing in luxury real estate in London, etc.).
The way I see it, the pope is a politically-minded person, not a church-minded person. Political activists do have no problem ascending to power to destroy what they do not like about an institution. Look at the new district attorney in San Francisco, for example. He’s the son of convicted terrorists who decided to become a prosecutor so the city would not put criminals in prison. He wanted to become a prosecutor to undermine the prosecution of criminals. The pope is the same way. He’s the pope who wants to make the Catholic Church less Catholic in every way possible, and that includes driving out specific groups of people. He’s the first pope in history who is fine with the idea of a schism. Let that truth wash over you.
[…] and Altar considers why Pope Francis is allowing idolatry in his church. Also, an examination of the concept of Anonymous Christians, being those who are unconsciously […]
It is obviously better that the Church empty and people know that they are not Christians (anonymous or otherwise), than for them to stay and believe they are Christians, when they are actually adherents of Progressivism, with its mixture of naivete and power worship. In the first case, they can repent. In the second, they are confirmed in their sin.
He is not the first pope who is being pushed toward heresy and apostasy. Every single pope in history had the very same issue. The only difference between catholic pontiffs and post conciliar pontiffs is that the former ex communicated those who made such demands.
I don’t know much about V2 history but I’ve had the same thought repeatedly – the Church was in rapid decline and it was an attempt to minimize the apostacy/maximize the number saved (figuring the serious Catholics would be OK either way). It’s how some people react when they have a good child and a bad child. They often give into the demands of the bad child, put more effort into appeasing them etc. because they figure the good child will be alright.
Not saying it was the right approach but I think it takes such a big institution run by men appointed for life a significant amount of time to recognize and correct.
I think the pontiff’s job starts with conserving the Apostolic Deposit of Faith without admixture of error, and in doing what he can to ensure that even fairly-dim persons can locate the Content of the Christian Religion by finding it being proclaimed by The Church Christ Founded.
Then, when they’ve found it, they can opt either to submit to it, or not. But they won’t have the excuse that it was impossible to find, because the Petrine Successor did whatever he could to make it clearly visible.
This, after all, is the whole purpose of papal infallibility. There’s no reason God should bother to intervene in the world in such a unique way, other than to prevent the Content of Christianity from becoming a lost body of knowledge, fitfully guessed-at by attempting to weed-through or reconcile various proposed reconstructions of Christian orthodoxy obtained through tradition-ignorant exegesis, as it is amongst Protestants, or tradition-informed exegesis, as it is amongst the various Eastern/Oriental Orthodox separated hierarchies.
But with the firmness and irrevocability provided by papal dogmatic definitions, and by ecumenical councils approved by the pope, there are at least some parts of Christianity that we can just know, without guesswork.
Given this, even if 50% of the canonically-Catholic persons on earth held some form of liberal Episcopalianism to be true, and 45% held paganism to be true, and only 5% believed in “God the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and earth…,” et cetera; even THEN the Roman Pontiff would be obliged to commend that 5% with fatherly affection, and to instruct (however tenderly) the ignorant 95% that their beliefs were in error, and put them in danger of hell. That’s what a kindly father would do. Heck, it’s what a competent “watchman on the walls” would do.
A pontiff who instead singles out the 5% for opprobrium, and flatters the 95%, either doesn’t believe in hell, or is perversely trying to make sure the 95% get no warning, and have no hope of escaping it.
“What if he’s right?”
Even if he were right — and I don’t think he is; painting his cardinal-advisors that way seems pretty realistic, but painting the whole laity that way is rather too bleak — but even if he were right, he still wouldn’t be IN the right.
What if, you ask, “[the pachamamas, etc.] are the bare minimum he must do for a flock demanding idolatry?”
“Must?” So what if the flock were all demanding idolatry? That isn’t, in itself, any reason to cater to it. It isn’t as if he has to win reelection after four years!
You ask, “What if he’s right?” …that this is needed, to keep the Church from “emptying utterly.”
Even if he thought this way, he couldn’t possibly be correct about it. If it “emptied” down to only the 5% remnant of serious believers, it still wouldn’t be “utterly” emptied.
So I think that idea is a cul-de-sac.
Pontiffs have often, in the past, been installed by members of the ruling elite for the purpose of advancing a non-Christian agenda.
So too, here. Pope Francis is exactly what the indifferentist internationalist elite ruling class have, over the last hundred years, gradually subverted the university system and seminaries to produce: A touchy-feely cleric whose priorities are those of any director of a U.N.-funded NGO. Many (most?) of the other Catholic clerics are the same. With so many clerics matching that description, it was only a matter of time before one was made pontiff.
Nicely played, Freemasons! (Or whomever.) Looks like the indifferentist/syncretists have won that game.
But that game? That wasn’t even Set, let alone Match.
Yes, Tagle or some other nincompoop is likely to succeed Francis. In the meantime the faithless Catholics will have one child each, and the faithful ones will have six or eight, and will homeschool them all. They’ll keep them home from PSR, which teaches heterodoxy, and drill them in the Baltimore Catechism instead.
Give it time. We’ll see who gets old and dies out first.